On Kate Jennings: Writers on Writers

By Erik Jensen

Kate says she doesn’t know what to say about writing. When people ask, she tells them to prepare for a life of failure.

Award-winning writer Erik Jensen plunges the reader into the world of acclaimed novelist, poet and pioneering feminist Kate Jennings. Weaving in his interviews with Jennings in New York, he shows how poetry, politics and family were transmuted into her first novel, Snake – a work of art that depicts rural Australia in a funny, cutting and unforgettable way. This is a biography of a book and the life that made it.

In the Writers on Writers series, leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Oct 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925435818

Erik Jensen

Jessica Blank is an actor and writer whose television credits include Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Rescue Me, and One Life to Live; film credits include The Namesake (directed by Mira Nair) and The Exonerated (for Court TV). Her first novel, Home, is forthcoming in 2007. Erik Jensen has costarred in more than a dozen feature films, including The Love Letter and Black Knight, and such television shows as Love Monkey, Alias, CSI, and Law & Order; recent stage credits include Y2K and Corpus Christi. They live in Brooklyn.

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Kate and I met for the first time in the cold of a New York winter, her brain hot with zoster virus. A sickness was scratching inside her skull, pushing on the backs of her eye sockets.

She blinked at me as we stood outside the restaurant. There was a pause, made long by the weather. ‘You look threadbare,’ she said, finally. ‘All Australians are threadbare.’

This was half a dozen years ago. Later, I told the poet Jennifer Clement about the exchange. She said: ‘You must steal that straight into a novel.’

I had looked up Kate because I was a fan of her essays – pieces about her life, mostly, ruthless in their precision. At lunch, she talked about everything. She talked without prompt or hesitation. When the bill came, she looked at me again. ‘I’m sorry if I said anything awful. It’s this damned zoster. It does things.’

* * *

She calls her Girlie and him Boy.

She calls their mother Irene and their father Rex.

She calls their town Progress. The bush is full of savage irony.

She says their father is a good man, but disappointed. He grew up on chalk soil, a blighted soil. His family tilled it for wheat. He stayed home from school one harvest and never went back.

She says their mother is cold and sarcastic. She has expectations. Irene passes a harshness on to her children. They grow up ignoring their father.

They are hers and not his.

Kate does not wait. She says most of this on the very first page.

* * *

She was writing a poem but it wasn’t working.

She read Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid. She felt for the sense of character, the smallness of the story, the uncomplicated curiosity of children. Kincaid’s novel begins with a superstition made from childhood. It reads: ‘For a short while during the year I was ten, I thought only people I did not know died.’

Kate realised she was writing a book.

* * *

Irene’s wedding ends in her parents’ garden. A climbing lily is in bloom. Kate uses its Latin name – Gloriosa superba – to hide the cruelty of the image.

Irene’s family is Anglican and rich. They are so certain, so complacent, they resemble well-stuffed sofas. Friends think of Irene as fast. Her parents sleep in separate bedrooms.

Rex, a bridesmaid notices, is bewildered, like a schoolboy who has lost his lunch money. A sister thinks he is as interesting as a month of wet Sundays. He has returned from the Victory March in London, but in retelling it can only think to mention the neck of the man marching in front of him. His parents are well scrubbed and talcumed, out of place in this house. The neck, in his story, is dirty. He recalls this with a bleat of nervous laughter. Earlier, he thought about crying.

The house at which Rex and Irene arrive is raised on wood posts. Pigface is in bloom. Kate does not dress up its name. A step on the verandah is loose and Rex promises to fix it. ‘His tone annoyed Irene,’ Kate writes. ‘She brushed the feeling away, but it re-formed, hovered, settled, like a mantle of flies on a hot day.’

Later, it ‘grew in her like an iris rhizome, bulbous and knotted, to be divided and planted elsewhere, time and again’.

* * *

Kate Jennings was born Catherine and spent her first years as Cathy. To family, she still is Cathy.

She was born in Temora and grew up in Hanwood, in the New South Wales Riverina. On one side was the town of Yoogali. On the other, Willbriggie. There was a primary school, a convent and a post office. The year was 1948. The population was just on fifty.

‘I remember far too much,’ Kate says. ‘I always say I have got a terrible memory, but I dredge it up. I was so very lonely. And at the mercy of my mother.’ Later, she says: ‘While I remember a lot, when I was living it I didn’t comprehend much. I didn’t understand sex, not in the least, and that would seem to have been bubbling away under the surface all the time. Ineluctable. I wanted out, to go to Sydney, and be a poet.’

Kate has a younger brother.